Hate Freeways? You Aren’t Doing Your City Any Favors

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- A growing literature trumpets the
news that cities around the world are tearing down freeways.

The authors of these articles cite the Embarcadero Freeway
along the waterfront in San Francisco; the elevated West Side
Highway beside the Hudson River in lower Manhattan; the Central
Artery in downtown Boston; and the Park East Freeway near the
center of Milwaukee.

The most conspicuous recent case has been the Alaskan Way
viaduct that runs along the waterfront in Seattle, and where
demolition started in late 2011. Outside the U.S., examples
include the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto and the
Cheonggyecheon in Seoul.

The usual conclusion drawn from these accounts is that
these urban highways were a mistake from the outset and that
they should be torn down to create spaces for people instead of
cars. Unfortunately this reading of the story mischaracterizes
what is actually happening and draws the wrong conclusions for
current public policy.

In fact, very few freeways are being removed. What is
happening instead is that a few ramps and dead-end road segments
are being removed, and small portions of freeways, particularly
elevated highways in sensitive locations, are being rerouted
into tunnels or transformed into boulevards. In Boston, for
example, the elevated highway was replaced by a tunnel, which is
also the plan for Seattle. In San Francisco and New York, they
were replaced by surface boulevards.

Comparison to Rail

These changes are not new or revolutionary, and they
certainly don’t prove that the construction of urban freeways
was inherently a bad idea. Exactly the same process happened
with steam railroads in the 19th century and rapid rail transit
in the early 20th century. Very few observers today would deny
railroads and elevated transit lines allowed for an enormous
growth in the mobility of people and goods and helped fuel a
substantial rise in wealth. At the same time, these lines were
often built cheaply and quickly without due consideration of the
effect they had on the areas adjacent to them, the way they
displaced homes and businesses, increased noise and pollution,
erected barriers between communities and created safety hazards
for vehicles trying to cross the tracks.

Over the last 100 years, a huge amount of money and energy
has gone into minimizing these problems by eliminating grade
crossings, decking over railroad lines, moving large freight
yards farther out of town and replacing elevated transit with
subways. In most cities, railroads have been tamed to the point
where most residents, at least those who don’t have to live
adjacent to them or negotiate grade-level crossings, rarely
think of them as overscale and hostile intrusions into the urban
fabric.

Highways have brought many of the same benefits and most of
the same problems. It is easy to forget today how difficult and
wasteful of time and fuel it was to try to drive anything but
short distances across any urban area before the interstate
highway era. The new ring roads allowed long-distance traffic,
especially trucks, to bypass the core, and express roads within
the built-up area allowed residents access to a vastly increased
number of jobs, retail establishments and places of recreation.
It is not a coincidence that the creation of the national
superhighway network coincided with one of the most impressive
eras of economic expansion in American history.

Spawning Suburbs

In the case of city centers, it has become a cliche that
the freeways allowed people and businesses to leave for the
suburbs. It is true that freeways helped spawn suburban shopping
centers and office parks, but it is also true that without these
roads many downtowns might have fared even worse. As early as
the 1920s, outlying business districts, like Englewood and
Uptown in Chicago or Hollywood and Glendale in Los Angeles, were
already starting to draw a substantial amount of business away
from the old downtowns.

That is why central-city advocates pushed so hard to bring
express roads into the very heart of the city after World War
II. By radiating from this core, the highway network did a great
deal to keep downtowns at the center of urban transportation
systems even in the face of new hubs like airports.

The urban freeway did bring with it undeniable problems,
almost all of them similar to those created by the railroads,
and after the initial burst of urban highway building in the
1950s and ’60s there was a sharp reaction.

The most famous early anti-highway agitation was the
campaign against freeways in San Francisco starting in the 1950s
and specifically against plans for the Embarcadero Freeway,
which would have cut off increasingly gentrifying neighborhoods
from the waterfront. Several freeways were removed from the
city’s transportation plan, and construction on the Embarcadero
Freeway was stopped dead in its tracks. After the 1989 Loma
Prieta earthquake, the small remaining portion was demolished
and replaced by a boulevard.

Highway revolts elsewhere were also successful in stopping
projected freeways, often the ones that would have gone through
the most affluent areas of American cities. These anti-highway
movements, like the protests that accompanied the construction
of public housing, were partly based on self-interest and not-in-my-backyard sentiments. They also pinpointed real problems. A
great many of the roads did create social and environmental
problems.

Repair, Don’t Remove

In response, engineers and transportation planners started
to create more sensitive highway designs. By the time many of
these new proposals were made public, however, sentiment had
swung so far that even these greatly improved proposals -- such
as revised plans for the Crosstown Expressway in Chicago or
Westway in New York -- were defeated.

Although conspicuous, the pieces of freeway that are now
being replaced or removed are quite small. The vast majority of
the urban freeway network still stands because these roads have
done what they were supposed to do, carrying heavy traffic that
otherwise would need to thread its way through city streets.

There is no practical replacement for them. Outside of the
central areas of New York, Chicago and a few other cities,
public transportation carries only a tiny percentage of trips in
any American metropolis. Short of massive rearrangements of our
urban fabric and dramatically higher densities, neither public
transportation, bicycles nor walking can replace the automobile.
Our urban areas are just too large, and urban dwellers too
unwilling to give up the enormous benefits that automotive
mobility has given them.

Chicago’s Experience

For all these reasons, while some segments of freeway are
coming down, in other places incomplete pieces of the highway
system are being slowly filled in or new roads proposed.
Stopping the Crosstown in Chicago in the 1970s, for example, did
very little to help the neighborhoods through which it was
supposed to pass.

These neighborhoods continued to lose population and jobs.
Traffic was instead funneled onto the overcrowded freeways that
run immediately adjacent to the Loop. Not surprisingly, there
have been a number of calls in recent years to create some kind
of high-volume road along the old Crosstown alignment.

The replacement of urban freeways with less intrusive
roadways is something that should be widely reported and
celebrated. New, less expensive methods of tunneling, quieter
and safer vehicles, and rising land values in reviving central
cities all point to an era in which the urban freeways of the
postwar years can be tamed to create the cleaner, healthier city
that everyone wants. Characterizing the current movement as any
kind of wholesale removal of urban freeways, however, is
inaccurate and demonizing them as inherently a bad idea, is
counterproductive.

It’s time to end the freeway revolt and push for policies
that will expand mobility of all kinds, while reducing the
detrimental side effects.

(Robert Bruegmann is a professor emeritus of art history,
architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at
Chicago and the author of “Sprawl: A Compact History.” The
opinions expressed are his own.)

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To contact the writer of this article:
Robert Bruegmann at bbrueg@uic.edu.